


Kindest Regards

by lilyhandmaiden



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dramatic Miscalculations, Episode: s01e11 Little Sister, F/M, Feelings Realization, Friends With Benefits, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26181007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyhandmaiden/pseuds/lilyhandmaiden
Summary: "What Stevie had in mind was really a win-win scenario for her: either David, seeing that she actually had other options, would make a move to lock her down, or he wouldn’t, and she would get to sleep with Grant, which would knock David Rose right out of her head, and they could all move on. She would, she thought, be equally good with either outcome."Stevie's perspective on season 1 episode 11, "Little Sister," in which Stevie and David engage in a game of emotional chicken, a competition where the one who talks about their feelings first loses.
Relationships: Stevie Budd & David Rose, Stevie Budd/David Rose, Stevie Budd/Grant Byers
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a digression in the next chapter of my first Schitt's Creek fic, "Maybe This Time," but it got so long and the verb tenses got so confusing that I decided to lift it out and make it its own thing. Millions of thanks to Carrie for reading some early excerpts and expressing her feelings via emojis, and to Kate for her annotated(!) beta read.

Stevie and David fell into the friends-with-benefits thing without really discussing it. Once they’d hooked up, and it became clear that there was an open invitation to keep hooking up, it just seemed like the easiest thing to do—the option that required the least awkwardness and self-reflection. They would sneak over to the honeymoon suite—which was not a suite so much as a room and not for honeymoons anymore so much as for storage—any time they were horny or bored and stood a decent chance of not running into either of David’s parents. Since the Roses’ rooms stood in between the motel’s front office and the aforementioned honeymoon suite, and since none of the family currently had jobs to go to, this was not really as often as Stevie or David would have liked, but they managed.

The closest they came to an actual conversation about their relationship status was after their third assignation, when, while Stevie was pulling her flannel shirt back on, David asked, “So are we... like... a _thing_ now?” Stevie looked over her shoulder to find him still lying under the garishly red covers, picking at the comforter. He glanced over at her, his lips pursed. “Are we... ‘dating?’” She could hear the air quotes without him having to actually do them.

Stevie smirked and felt around the bed skirt for her other sock. “I don’t think you could call what we’re doing dating.”

She’d kind of expected him to have a comeback ready for that—something witty and rude and sort of sexy that would clarify exactly what he wanted their next steps to be. But he was silent while she put on her socks and her Converse, although she thought she could feel his eyes on her back.

She was tying her right shoe when he finally said, “So, then, should we...” He trailed off, and she turned to look at him again, waiting for the end of that sentence. Instead, he started over. “Do you want to go to...” He sighed, his eyes darting away from her, rolling toward the mirrored ceiling, “the café, I guess, since there’s nowhere else around here? Or something?”

“Hm.” The _should we_ , the _or something_ sounded so... obligatory. “Love that enthusiasm,” she snarked. “And that tempting offer. But I think I’m good.”

She stood, and when she turned back, she was surprised to see David’s eyebrows drawn together, forming a little crease between them. For a second, she wondered if she’d miscalculated and picked the wrong tone. But it was only for a second. Maybe she’d imagined it. Because then those eyebrows raised in a show of intrigue—or was it extreme incredulity?

“Oh, so do you have, like, wildly exciting plans for tonight?”

Stevie shrugged. “Maybe.” She made for the exit.

“What are they?” David teased. “What are your wildly exciting plans, Stevie Budd?”

She tossed her hair in the doorway. “I prefer to preserve a little mystery, thanks.”

And then she went home and watched _House Hunters International._

But about two weeks later, as they walked side by side toward the honeymoon/storage room, gently ribbing each other about their respective housekeeping abilities, Stevie was startled by the impulse to reach out and hold David’s hand.

She didn’t do it.

She kept her hand down by her side, though, almost touching David’s, just in case _he_ did. A warm feeling blossomed in the pit of her stomach when her knuckles accidentally brushed against his, and she looked down at her feet, letting her hair curtain her face so he wouldn’t notice her blushing.

_What in the hell?_

Admittedly, it wasn’t the first time she’d felt that feeling around David Rose. It snuck up on her when she looked at him sometimes, but she’d assumed that it was mostly lust-based and would go away once the novelty of the sex wore off. That was what usually happened with the guys she was interested in. But not only was that not the case with David, now there was this added component where she apparently wanted to show affection— _connection_ —with him, out in the _daylight_ , where _anyone_ could theoretically see them.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it the rest of the day. Her mind leapt back to it while David was pinned between her thighs, pulling her down to kiss him and also to block his reflection in the ceiling mirror. Solitaire back at her desk was an insufficient distraction. That night, while she watched _House Hunters_ , she found herself imagining David’s commentary on the featured couples and their questionable taste in kitchens. Lying in the dark, she wondered what it would be like to actually fall asleep curled up against David, here, in her own bed, in the place where she _lived_.

After a restless night, she decided that before she examined her own feelings any further, she needed to figure out what exactly David Rose felt about _her_. So, first thing in the morning, she called Grant Byers to come repair the wiring in the light switch across from the front desk, which had been broken for the past three months.

Grant had been the motel’s repair guy for over a decade, but in the past year and a half, he had gotten a) divorced, and b) really buff. So what Stevie had in mind was really a win-win scenario for her: either David, seeing that she actually had other options, would make a move to lock her down, or he wouldn’t, and she would get to sleep with Grant, which would knock David Rose right out of her head, and they could all move on. She would, she thought, be equally good with either outcome.

So when Grant arrived at the motel, Stevie flashed him a winning smile and let her eyes travel blatantly down the outline of his toned physique. She said, “Wow, you look good. Have you been working out?”

And Grant appeared, if not disarmed, at least pleasantly surprised. “Oh, no, y’know, just comes with the territory.” He shrugged in a way that only served to emphasize seemingly every muscle in his upper body.

Which really made it almost too easy. Stevie let him settle into working on the lights before saying, “And is the ‘territory’ you refer to the gym, or...?”

“Uh, no,” Grant chuckled. “I don’t go to the gym.”

“Huh.” For about thirty seconds, Grant attended to the wiring in silence. “So like a home gym, then?”

“No, the new apartment’s too small for a home gym.”

“Hmm.”

Stevie leaned across the desk, resting her head on one hand, and watched Grant work. This was not exactly a hardship. He did look really good—probably even better than when he’d been a senior on the high school hockey team and she’d been a freshman stuck behind this same desk. Back then, she’d have killed to get him to glance back at her with the dopey smile he was giving her now. If only she’d known that all it would take was a complete lack of subtlety.

She glanced at the time on her phone and wondered when David was going to make his daily appearance.

“Okay, so you’re saying,” she said, once four or five exchanges had exhausted her well of fitness-related repartee, “that I would be as in-shape as you are if I just fixed lights all day.”

“Pretty much. Well—” he looked over his shoulder at her again and slowly broke into that smile, “a few pull-ups here and there.”

“Okay, so you _do_ work out!” She heard the door open and her eyes slid over to see David finally enter the office. Without dropping a beat, she dialed her reaction up a notch, adding a laugh to accompany her grin. “You are such a liar!”

David clocked Grant’s attractiveness and the vibe in the room immediately. His gaze shifted from Grant to Stevie and back. “Oh! Wow, did Stevie say something funny, or...?” There was, she thought, a slight possessive undertone to the question.

Stevie then had the pleasure of introducing David as “one of our permanent guests here,” and was rewarded with a faux-amiable, “Don’t say that... again.” She watched the two men shake hands with polite, fixed smiles, looking like some kind of weird, sexy _Odd Couple_ reboot—David with his upright posture, his carefully-styled hair, and his floral print sweater over a fully-buttoned button-down; Grant looking as though he hadn’t so much as seen a hairbrush in at least 24 hours, with the top of his shirt open, his tool belt pulling his camo pants low on his hips.

“Grant does repairs around here,” Stevie said.

David met that news with a less-than-enthusiastic, “Oh, great.”

“He was _also_ just trying to tell me that he got that body from _just_ being a handyman.”

“Well, isn’t Grant just a big, fat liar!” David smiled, with a voice that was just a bit too loud and a lot too vehement for the joke to land.

There was an awkward pause in which both men looked from each other to Stevie, Grant’s expression curious and David’s slightly mortified and panicked. Then Grant excused himself to get something from his van.

“My head is all over the place, she keeps distracting me,” he said to David in a way that, if David had had any doubts as to what he’d walked in on, should definitely have removed them.

As soon as the door closed behind Grant, David dropped the fake smile and his eyebrows arched. “ _Wow_ ,” he said. “He is wearing a _tight shirt_. Ha ha.” He came to lean his crossed arms on her desk, managing to do something he did every day in a way that was completely forced and unnatural. He asked, “So, is he gonna do some repairs on your—on your undies?”

“Who’s to say he hasn’t already?” He hadn’t. Well—there had been that time he’d briefly broken up with the woman he would later marry and then divorce, when he and Stevie had met at a tailgate party and gotten to second base on the bed of a pickup truck, but that didn’t count. Her undies had barely entered the picture. Over the past few months, though, Stevie had learned that David couldn’t read her when she bluffed.

“ _Wow_! Great!”

A pause. David was looking at her with something like surprise—like he was seeing her, or some part of her, for the first time. And like that bothered him.

So Stevie decided to push him. With perfect nonchalance, she asked, “Why, is that a problem for you?”

He pushed back immediately, and a little harder than necessary: “No! No. Do you. Do him. Do both. Do things.”

“Great!”

“Yeah.”

“I think I might.”

“Good! Jump in.”

And they were at an impasse.

David looked like he wanted to say something else. But he didn’t. He bit his lip, and he looked away.

“Sooo...” So he was just going to let her do this, apparently? Stevie eyed him across the desk, suddenly apprehensive that maybe _she_ couldn’t read David when _he_ bluffed, either. She would, she decided, give him one more out—a really obvious one—as a conciliatory gesture. As though it was just occurring to her for the first time, she said, “We should probably establish some boundaries about this whole ‘friends with benefits’ thing.”

“Okay. Yeah. No, let’s do that,” David responded shortly, looking down. But as he did so, his demeanor shifted subtly, the tense awkwardness gone like it had never been there in the first place. When he looked back at her, the corner of his mouth quirked ever-so-slightly upward in that way she found irresistible—the way it did when he was too amused at his own cleverness to go fully deadpan. “Let’s, uh, let’s put up some boundaries... for the infrequent benefits that our friendship has, I think that’s really good. Can we do that _after_ you screw Mr. Fix-It, or... would you like to do it now? Let’s throw some boundaries up.”

She hated him. Except that she didn’t, at all. And if that was the way he wanted to play this game... “Okay.”

***

Fixing the lights ended up being a more involved process than Stevie had anticipated. There came a point when a ladder had to be brought in and some of the fixtures on the ceiling removed. At first, she thought maybe Grant just wanted to stick around to keep flirting with her, but when she joked, “Should I be worried about the motel burning down?” he just said, “Not anymore,” which was humbling. She made a private resolution not to wait three months on electrical repairs in the future.

Around noon, Grant settled onto the couch with takeout from the café while Stevie ate her lunch at her desk.

“You know,” she said, breaking the silence, “I think this room might actually look better in the dark. Makes it harder to see how long it’s been since I’ve dusted. That’s a joke,” she clarified, because Grant was studying the room a little too closely. Then Grant was studying _her_ , so she added, “...What?”

“No, just...” He smiled. “Just remembering that time I caught you looking at porn on the computer back there.”

“Oh, my _God_ , that was a _pop-up_.” Some long-buried part of Stevie instantly felt fifteen again. “Probably off some sketchy site Aunt Maureen pulled up.”

“You couldn’t get it to close. And you were so freaked out your grandparents were going to see it.”

“Yeah, well, they _did_ see it, and that was the day we ordered antivirus software.” She leaned back in her chair and swiveled back and forth. “Which just means that now, I can look at porn without crashing the computer.”

“Oh, is that why you never come out from behind that desk?”

“Do you _want_ me to come out from behind the desk?”

Grant shrugged. “I’m just curious about whether you’re wearing pants back there.”

Stevie smirked. She stood up, came around to the front of the desk, and leaned back to rest her elbows on it. “Disappointed?”

Grant looked her up and down, not answering. After a pause, he cleared his throat and said, “Uh... I know we kind of just had lunch together, but I don’t know if that counts, since we’re both on the clock. So I was wondering if you’d be interested in having dinner. With me. Tonight.”

“Oh!” Stevie blinked, suddenly feeling weirdly exposed standing there without the desk between them. “Um...”

This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? What she’d been angling for all day, more or less? It was just that she hadn’t been expecting _dinner_. Drinks, maybe. Or “drinks,” as in, “hey, come back to my place for ‘a drink.’” Dinner was like a _date_. For people who wanted to _actually date_ each other. She and David had never done dinner. And David wasn’t even here to appreciate that. Reflexively, Stevie’s eyes slid over to the door, which did not open.

She hesitated long enough that Grant said, “I mean, unless... you don’t want to. I just thought—I’ve been having a lot of fun today, and I thought we were getting along really well...”

Stevie quickly nodded. “No, yeah. Definitely.” It wasn’t like there was anything stopping her, technically. So, why not? She smiled. “I’d be very interested in having dinner with you tonight.”

Grant smiled back and his biceps flexed under his tight, tight shirt, and as Stevie slid back into her chair behind the desk, her main thought was that she couldn’t _wait_ to tell David and watch his head explode.

***

If Stevie perhaps felt a tiny twinge of guilt when David re-entered the office later that afternoon, it lasted only as long as it took for him to ask, with an air of wide-eyed interest and that barely-repressed smirk, “So. You and Grant. How are things going?”

“Uhh, well, he asked me out for dinner tonight, so... we’re gonna do that.” She made her voice and expression as suggestive as possible. “We’re gonna go for dinner, Grant and I.”

But David even didn’t flinch. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s—Well, he seems like a really, like, _respectable_ guy, like one of those guys that has like a... candy bowl of condoms on his bedside table or something.”

“Ooh, I hope so! Wonder what color I’ll get.”

They each laughed, a little uneasily. If he would just _say_ something—but he didn’t. Instead, he abruptly changed the subject.

Apparently David wanted her to know that, while she and Grant were out together, he would be selflessly “giving back” by “mentoring a teen in crisis,” the very _idea_ of which would fuel Stevie better than coffee for the rest of the day, possibly the week.

“And on a scale of one to ten, how much are you looking forward to that?” she asked, choking back laughter. 

“...Threepointfive. I’m gonna leave you be, because it’s not every day you get to go on a date with a guy who owns a windowless van, so that—Oh, Grant!”

Grant had indeed re-entered, and Stevie watched as some part of David immediately retreated back into himself, leaving him stilted and uncomfortable again.

Grant circled around to lean one arm on the desk and one on the back of her chair, almost-but-not-quite around her shoulders, which she imagined must have projected a very cozy image for David to take no board—one that was hopefully not undercut too much when Grant said, “What’re you doing? You, uh, checking out porn again?”

“Ah ha ha ha!” David forced out a very fake laugh. “I’m gonna go! I’m gonna go.” He made for the door. “Um... warmest regards to you both.”

“Best wishes!” Stevie exclaimed, throwing an exaggerated grin at him as he retreated.

When the door closed behind David, Stevie felt almost surprised to find Grant still hanging over her. She figured she probably needed to explain what was going on, somehow, in a way that didn’t include the fact that she and David were sleeping together.

But Grant just said, “ _Such_... a weird dude.”

That feeling bubbled up in Stevie’s chest again, the fond one she got when David was being particularly himself sometimes, the one that made her want to hold his hand like a goddamn teenager.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, he is.”


	2. Chapter 2

That night, Stevie found herself seated across from Grant at Alessandro’s Italian Eatery in Elmdale. There were all-you-can-eat breadsticks on the table and black-and-white photos on the walls that might have been of Alessandro’s Italian family or might have been bought at a flea market. Stevie and Grant studied their menus. They’d both changed their clothes before meeting at the restaurant—Grant into a shirt with sleeves that covered his forearms, unfortunately, and Stevie into one of her lighter, floral-print button-downs—the blue one. It might actually have complemented what David was wearing today, she thought, and bit her lip. She wondered self-consciously if she should have put on more makeup.

“I was glad I got your call today,” Grant said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been to the motel.”

“Yeah... I would invite you more often, but weirdly our stuff almost never breaks. Either that, or it just takes us forever to notice, since most of our rooms are usually empty.”

David would have one-upped that remark in a heartbeat. Grant tilted his head a little, like he was unsure whether to take it as a joke or not, which was cute in a puppyish way. The waitress came to take their orders, and by the time she left, the thread of the conversation had dropped. They sat in silence for a minute, trying to figure out how to pick it back up again.

For the life of her, the only thing Stevie could come up with was, “So... how’s your van?”

“My van? My van is fine. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no, it’s just...” She shook her head, fixing her eyes on the red-checked tablecloth. “David made some dumb joke earlier about your windowless van. Um. Sorry.”

“David—is that the guy who was hanging around the motel today?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be the one.”

Grant gave that cute half-smile again. “So, what’s his deal?”

“Uh... what do you mean?” Stevie picked up her straw wrapper and began to methodically shred it into tiny pieces.

“Y’know, why’s he hanging around the lobby of a motel all day?”

“Oh.” Stevie paused with half the wrapper still intact and looked back up at her date. “Well, his family lost, like, a _ton_ of money, and now they live in the motel. And none of them have jobs, or... skills to do jobs... so talking to me is just something to do, I guess.” She shrugged.

“Oh. Wow.” Grant blinked. “Okay, wait, are they the people who bought the town? I feel like I heard about them. The Rose Video family?”

“Yep. That’s them.”

“Jeez.” Grant shook his head. “Well, _that_ explains a lot.”

Stevie nodded. “Right?” She wasn’t entirely sure whether Grant was referring to the fact that David had grown up with money or the fact that he’d lost it all, but both probably applied equally, so did it matter? “Partly, anyway. Yeah...” She trailed off.

“So you’re hanging out with the actual Mr. Rose Video,” Grant said.

“Yeah, if only Nana Budd could see me now. Although,” she couldn’t help adding, “the _actual_ Mr. Rose Video is David’s father? David is more like Mr. Rose Trust Fund.”

“Right.” Grant chuckled. “So how is Mr. Rose Trust Fund liking Schitt’s Creek?”

“Oh, he hates it. Like, _everything_ about it. The sights... the sounds... the smells...” She felt her lips twitch into a tiny smile. “But, I dunno, he kind of tries sometimes.”

“Really? ‘Cause the guy I saw at the motel earlier did not seem like someone looking to blend in.”

“Uhh, he’s been sampling the local culture? He went to a tailgate, and he did Twyla’s yoga once, and he tried to sell Allez-Vous, and oh!” She leaned across the table. “He went on a _turkey shoot_.”

“ _No._ ”

“Yes!” Stevie cackled. “It was _so bad_! He didn’t know how to hold the gun, and he hit one in the neck and it took forever to bleed out. Plus Roland Schitt called him ‘scrappy’ or something? It was...” She shook her head, grinning.

“Why did he _go_?”

“I don’t know! I mean, I asked him as kind of a dare, I didn’t think he’d say _yes_.”

Grant raised an eyebrow. “ _You_ asked him?”

“Well, ‘asked’ might be a strong word. I _dared_ him to go because he was afraid of a bug.”

Stevie proceeded to relate with gusto the fiasco of the bug with the milky exoskeleton in David’s room, and how that had led David to the turkey shoot in an attempt to showcase his supposed rugged outdoorsiness. Grant laughed in all the right places, but when the story was over, he looked thoughtful.

“So... he wanted to impress you?”

Stevie scoffed. “What? No. Why would he want to impress me?”

“I don’t know. I know that _I_ kind of wanted to impress you today.”

“Oh, well, _you’ve_ succeeded. So far.”

“Here’s hoping I keep it up,” Grant responded with bedroom eyes.

Their food arrived then, and the conversation shifted to more general topics—funny stories from work, what they’d been up to outside of work. Grant was charming—endearing, even—as he talked about the cat hoarders and horny middle-aged women he’d done repairs for over the past month. The problem, for Stevie, was that both her work stories and outside-of-work stories nowadays mostly revolved around the Roses, and David in particular. The games night that had spiraled out of control was a David story. The highlight of the last tailgate she’d gone to was David chugging from a beer bong. The best judgmental remarks about the few guests who’d checked into the motel recently had come from David. It could not be appropriate date etiquette to talk this much about the guy you were sleeping with while on a date with someone else.

Finally, Grant said, “Wow, you can’t seem to get rid of that guy,” and Stevie winced.

“Oh, well, he makes for good stories. Like, today he apparently mentored some kid who’s getting bullied at the high school, and I’m expecting to get a lot of mileage out of that.”

“Huh.” He sipped his wine. “Yeah, like I said—definitely a weird dude.”

“Yep.” Stevie drank as well. After a moment, she added, “I mean, he’s not weird in a _bad_ way. Just... different.”

“No, I know. I just meant he’s clearly... not from around here.”

“Right.” Stevie nodded. “Definitely from outside Elm County. If that’s what you mean by ‘weird.’”

“I... guess so?”

Stevie looked down at the shredded bits of straw wrapper to the side of her plate and took another gulp of wine. “I mean… yeah, he’s out of touch with basic reality and he’s _way_ overdramatic and he can be kind of an asshole. But… he’s also funny. Not always on purpose, but still, like, really funny. And smart. And never boring. And he’s just always…” She shook her head. “He just knows all this _stuff_ , and he has these bizarre stories from all over, and… and he has really good taste.” ~~~~

Grant raised his eyebrows. “Okay. Uh. Sorry. I didn’t know you actually liked him.”

Stevie’s heart skipped. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he’s clearly your friend. So, sorry.”

“Oh.” Stevie un-tensed somewhat. “Yeah. I guess he’s my friend.”

A silence settled over the table.

Finally, Grant said, “He’s gay, right?”

“Uh, no, actually.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, he is into men, but also into women, and also other people... He’s ‘into the wine, not the label.’ Metaphorically speaking. Is how he described it to me.”

“Oh,” Grant said again. “So you two talked about this?”

“Yeah, well, we were buying wine. And it... came up.” She finally managed to meet Grant’s eyes and smiled. Grant didn’t. And that was when she knew she was, in fact, not getting laid that night.

Not long after that, Grant got up to use the restroom. While Stevie waited for him to return, she engaged in what David would classify as “shame eating,” hating that she apparently couldn’t even stuff her face with pasta without thinking about David. She tried to work out some sort of explanation for when Grant came back as to why she couldn’t stop talking about another guy on their date. She couldn’t think of one.

After ten minutes, the last of her pasta was gone, and the seat across from hers was still empty. Stevie craned her neck in the direction of the restrooms and then did a visual sweep of the entire restaurant, just in case he had stopped to chat with someone he knew or something. No Grant. She gnawed halfheartedly on a breadstick.

Ten more minutes, and she thought she was starting to attract pitying glances from people at nearby tables. She traced her fingers along the lines of the tablecloth, wishing that Grant would come running in with some breathless but reasonable explanation for his long absence or that he would call and tell her why he’d suddenly had to leave or that the floor would open up and swallow her. After ten minutes of that, avoiding eye contact with everyone, she quietly paid the check, left Alessandro’s Italian Eatery, and drove herself home.

It took almost 45 minutes to get from Elmdale back to Schitt’s Creek, and on the way, in between bursts of embarrassment, anger, and self-loathing, Stevie finally admitted to herself that she had actual feelings for David. Sappy, tender, caring feelings not just about sex with David, but about David as a person. Feelings so obvious that apparently even dumb-as-rocks Grant could see them. So that was a problem.

When she pulled up to her apartment, she found that she couldn’t stand the thought of entering into the empty darkness and flopping down on her bed alone, so she decided to walk through town to clear her head. Maybe she’d go as far as the Wobbly Elm and get a drink—she could really use a drink right now.

It was a nice night, and as Stevie walked, she kicked at gravel on the side of the road. Inexorably, her thoughts turned to what she was going to say the next day when David asked her about her date with Grant. Was there a way to frame getting stood up halfway through dinner that didn’t sound pathetic and humiliating? She spent five minutes trying to come up with one and failed.

Why did she have to mess things up for herself every time? She could’ve been having a nice dinner and wine and sex with a perfectly decent guy, but she couldn’t shut up about David Rose. She was the small-town cliché who’d caught feelings for the sophisticated city boy. Stevie kicked a rock hard enough to send it skidding across the street toward Bob’s Garage.

The saddest part of all this was that, if she was being totally honest with herself, she was actually less pissed off that Grant had abandoned her at Alessandro’s than she was that David hadn’t stopped her from going in the first place. If he’d said the word, she’d rather have spent the evening with him. She’d rather spend _any_ evening with him, in fact. Somehow, over the past few months, David Rose had insinuated himself into her life in such a way that, even without the sex, the best part of every day started when he walked into her office.

So maybe she should just tell him that. Be honest. It couldn’t turn out any worse than her attempts to play him into saying it first had, right? She should knock on his door the next morning and just say, _David, unfortunately, I actually like you, so—_

Oh, fuck, there he was.

Walking by the Café Tropical, she was startled to see David through a gap in the curtains that were drawn across the front windows, like her thoughts had manifested him there or something. He was sitting alone at the counter, drinking a truly toxic-looking substance from a martini glass... with Twyla?

Her feet had carried her almost up to the door before it even occurred to her that she could just walk past. But by then, she could see that David looked like he was sitting under his own personal thundercloud, and inside she felt a spark of hope that maybe it was because he was picturing her out with Grant right now.

Abruptly, she decided she was too tired to make it all the way to the Wobbly Elm, and anyway, knowing Twyla’s drink-mixing ability, whatever she was serving would get her drunk a lot faster than what she’d have had at the bar.

She opened the door and went inside.

“What and why are we drinking?” she asked, seating herself next to David at the counter.

David greeted her with an “Oh my goodness!” before answering, “Um, I don’t know, and today some snippy teen told me that my life was a mess. So...”

Twyla added, “And I am now a single person,” which kind of put a damper on David’s delightful mentorship project update. Stevie was hoping to get in at least a few digs about that before...

“So! Did you spend the night washing your clothes on Grant’s abs?”

Before that.

“You’re funny,” Stevie said, in a tone that said the opposite. But she might as well get it over with. As quickly as she could while still sounding casual, she said, “Um, Grant went to the bathroom and never came back,” and promptly thanked Twyla for the drink she’d just been handed. Like it was nothing. Like ripping off a band-aid. The drink, when she oh-so-casually sipped it, tasted like cough medicine with sugar in it.

She waited for David to gloat. But he didn’t.

“What? He w—he went to the bathroom and never came back.”

“Mm-hm!”

“Oh...” Judging by the face journey David went on in that moment, he was not sure how to react. But, to his credit, he didn’t immediately burst out laughing, nor did he condescend to pity.

Stevie kept _her_ face perfectly neutral. “So either I was stood up halfway through my date, or Grant has some serious digestive issues,” she said, like it was no big deal—funny, even.

David met her eyes, and he nodded along with her, taking her lead, even though he knew—she could _tell_ he knew—at least some of what she was actually feeling.

“Wow.” He rolled his eyes, but at Grant’s expense, not at hers. “Sounds like a real catch.”

“Mm-hmm,” Stevie agreed solemnly. And _this_ —this was why she liked David Rose. Sometimes, out of nowhere, when he needed to be, David could be a good person. He could make her feel, if not okay, at least better. He could look at her, actually _look_ at her in a way no one had bothered to in years, and still see something that made him want to come hang out with her every day. She wondered if he’d be able to tell, if he looked at her right then, that she adored him for that—for understanding. But he was already starting to say something else.

“Um...” His fingers drummed on the base of his glass. “So, word on Teen Street is that our little ‘friends with benefits’ situation is a—”

“Not a good idea?” Stevie filled in, as David finished, “—bad idea.” Which was good, because it meant neither of them technically had to say it first. But Stevie’s body had gone tense, and in the space of the breath David took between that sentence and the next one, she felt another flash of hope. She didn’t have to say anything after all. He was _finally_ ready to ask her if she wanted to try this thing for real, and she was _of course_ going to be as gracious as possible when she said yes.

But then David said, slowly, “And because I don’t have any other friends here, I can’t afford to lose you, so... I think it’s best if we just—”

“Friends,” Stevie managed to say a fraction of a second before David did. As though it was so obvious and expected that he didn’t have to say it at all.

“Friends. Yup. I think that’s best.”

_Friends_. Fuck. Of course.

Stevie nodded vigorously even as sudden tears pricked at the bottoms of her eyes, and she forced herself to say, “Good. This is good.”

Because it was, objectively. It was healthy. It was best not to ruin a friendship, everybody knew that, and relationships were messy— _they_ were messy. It would never have worked, anyway—the fact that they’d spent the day competing to avoid a direct conversation was evidence of that. She was just... taken by surprise, that was all.

“That’s... good, right?” David searched her face, trying to reestablish the connection they’d had just minutes ago. But Stevie didn’t want him to read her anymore.

“It’s good,” she said firmly, and turned her face away, feeling her expression slipping, not wanting David to see.

Twyla came back to the counter. Stevie wasn’t sure exactly when she’d left.

“Okay,” David said. Stevie took a deep breath, and when she looked back at him, he was raising his glass of mystery drink and plastering a hopeful version of that fake smile he’d worn for Grant to his face. “Well... warmest... wishes to that.”

Stevie picked up her own glass. “Kindest regards.” Her voice sounded normal, basically, almost.

She clinked glasses with David, then Twyla.

***

That night, as she lay in bed by herself, sad and tired and more than a little drunk, her brain played through all the times David had leaned on her desk, smiled at her like he wanted her, made her smile back. She wondered how she’d fucked it all up the second she realized what she actually wanted, and how she was supposed to be around him now without him seeing how she felt.

_He ‘can’t afford to lose’ my friendship. How the fuck am I supposed to be_ friends _with David Rose?_

She sighed and buried her face in her pillow.

_This is never going to work._


End file.
